Se préparer au métier de footballeur: Analyse d'une socialisation professionnelle

Abstract

Preparing to be a footballer: analysis of a professional socialization This article, stemming from a thesis of sociology, explores the training process of professional footballers. The study deals with the training centre of a professional club, playing in the first league of the French championship, which welcomes young footballers aged 12 to 19. The socialization and the production of dispositions on which the training procedure is based, are comprehended thanks to a socio-ethnographic enquiry that mixes interviews with the apprentices and the trainers (58), long-term observations and the analysis of school records. This material permits to enlighten the characteristic features of their experience, founded on an intensive but also uncertain investment. Two main lines of analysis are developed. On the one hand, the article exposes both the conditions and the effects of an intensive investment perceived as a "passion". The training supposes the integration to a "world apart" that implies the recomposition of the non-sportive belonging (school, family, friends). On the other hand, this absorption by the footballistic universe leads to a modification of the connection to practice: indeed, due to the familiarization with competitive and professionalizing stakes, the latter tends to be progressively thought in terms of individual career.